How did the authors of the mystery stories 'The Red Room', 'The Engineers thumb' and 'The Signalman' create suspense in their stories?

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Introduction

How did the authors of the mystery stories 'The Red Room', 'The Engineers thumb' and 'The Signalman' create suspense in their stories? For this piece of coursework, I am going to be comparing the way that three short stories written and how they create suspense. The three stories are: �The Red Room by H.G. Wells �The Engineer's thumb by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle �The Signalman by Charles Dickens I will be analysing all three stories and doing comparisons between them to show what I have found out about how they create suspense and how it is used in each of the stories. In the Red Room, archaic (referring to an earlier period) language is used on several occasions. One of the times it is used is when the young man says 'Eight-and-twenty years, I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet'. From this I can infer that the story was not set in this generation as now we would not say 'eight and twenty years' we would say twenty eight years. ...read more.

Middle

As these three stories were all written before 1914 the audience then would have expected this language. In the Signalman there is some repetition because when the voice is heard shouting 'Halloa! Below there' a while later the same voice calls to him again saying the same thing. Also, it creates suspense because the reader would want to know who exactly is shouting and why. Another point is that in the Signalman when the signalman is killed by the train the driver reveals that he tried to warn the signalman by calling 'Halloa! Below there' but the signal man did not seem to listen. This would create a lot of suspense as the reader would want to know whether it was the same person calling both of the times or if it was a different person calling. Dickens creates the element of a ghost by using the same words both of the times. ...read more.

Conclusion

This is an advanced way of writing a story because it is not completely obvious to the reader but can make them be more interested in the story without them realising. This works because when they are reading the first paragraph it is not too long so that they don't get uninterested in the story and once the narrator begins talking about the event that took place those years ago they get interested in the story again because they are talking about a whole new thing. Overall, I think that the writers of the stories create suspense in a variety of different ways and although some of the techniques compare with the other stories others are used solely in one story. I also think that the better of the three stories is the Engineer's thumb for several reasons. One of them is that I am very intrigued by the Engineer's Thumb more than I am by the other two stories. Mohammed Ali Ahmed 10H/RBn 10E/4 11/11/08 ...read more.

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